


gun for hire

by afearsomecritter (jsaer)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), UnDeadwood (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-19 06:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22306474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jsaer/pseuds/afearsomecritter
Summary: He doesn't know what a god may want with a gunslinger, and he's not about to ask.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46





	gun for hire

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't actually sure what to do with this so posting it

\--

“Hey,” says the vulture, fluttering paper wings. 

He stares at it dully, ribs creaking with each inhale and exhale. The stone is warm under him, the cool shadow from the cliff above long since gone away. 

The vulture’s form stretches oddly, stutters between wing flashes and it’s a person and it’s a crow and a tree and something tall and lean.

He blinks, and breathes with shattered ribs. He’d heard head wounds made you see things.

The stone below him is warm and uncomfortable. 

“Hey,” rasps the vulture. It’s like it’s not sure what a human voice should sound like, three octaves too low and too high and threaded with the screaming canyon wind. 

Cards tap rock in front of his face. The hand holding it has scarred up knuckles and long fingers. He stares at the freckle on the thumb.

He has one just like it. 

"Wanna make a bet?"

Fuck you, he wants to say, but agony steals his tongue and "Yes" comes out instead.

(he is twenty-two and terrified, he is twenty-two and starting to realize he might never stop having to run)

\--

He's not stupid enough to bet often, he'd bet on his friends caring, on them not pinning a death on him, he'd bet on having a future.

He's not stupid, he knows how this goes.

(what a god needs a gunslinger for he has no idea but it's the one thing he's good at so he raises his pistol and aims-)

\--

"You have some terrible luck," the Dealer says to him, cards flashing between unnervingly normal human hands as it crouches next to him. Amos spits the blood in his mouth at it. It laughs. 

\--

It's when he takes a ricochet to the throat and walks away that he realizes he might've given away something a bit less nebulous than a soul.

That's fine though, humanity is equally as nebulous and he's gotten about as much use out of it as the gossamer bundle he'd handed over. Hell, maybe the human parts of him went with it.

(he eventually sees enough of people to decide that the two have fuck all to do with each other)

\--

Lightning crackles around the barrels of his guns sometimes, when he needs the shot to count or there's something about to eat him at the other end. Amos thinks it's just something he sees for a long while, like a lot of the other shit the Dealer sends him after.

He is disabused of this notion when he nearly gets hung in some fucking podunk town for _witchcraft_ of all things. Fuck priests, honestly. 

\--

Amos-Clayton, Clayton now-meets his first huckster on a train to Dallas, of all places. He’s a fairly well dressed fella in a suit with a nice hat sittin’ on the table next to him, fiddling with a deck of cards. The man’s quick hands looks clumsy to Clayton, too used to the tricks the Dealer pulls.

(once when he’d been delirious with blood loss and exhaustion he’d snatched at and caught the Dealer’s hand, convinced it had extra joints to account for the reality breaking nonsense it pulled with cards-it didn’t and he still had tiny scars in strange patterns where he’d touched it. they don’t hurt)

The huckster on the train is an older man, slicked back salt and pepper hair and a well trimmed goatee. He looks like a businessman, or a professional gambler. Clayton can see bright pink purple energy flickering around the cards as he shuffles them, and the Dealer leans over Clayton’s shoulder.

(there’s a wall behind him this shouldn’t be as annoying as it is)

“One of my more active gamblers, he’s quite the reckless one,” it says in his ear. Clayton can’t see its face (never can he refuses he’s so tired of mirrors) but he can feel its grin. 

The huckster glances up and happens to meet Clayton’s gaze. He looks at Clayton’s face, eyes widening, then his eyes drift to the right. 

Damn, Clayton hadn’t seen someone go that white that quick in a while, the poor bastard actually faints.

(what clayton doesn’t know is what he looks like, gleaming slate eyes under a dark brim, too bright in the shadows, and the figure of the Dealer all but draped over one shoulder, smiling)

\--

The Dealer uses him as its hands in the world, a very real, very physical threat or ending when someone thinks up a way to cheat, or the more often circumstance of Others trying to tilt tables or swap decks, as it were.

(cruel or not, coaxing or not, there is a terrible sort of fairness to the Dealer. It only rarely cheats)

\--

He can see souls, of course, made manifest in dull or bright glows in people’s chests. It’d be something straight from a poet’s books, rhapsodizing about the beauty of the human soul, except they’re in colors that don’t rightly exist in human sight, and some of those glows might well be hellfire. The glow ain’t always soft like that of a candle, either, some motes like snow hanging in the air during a sunny day, others others the flat cracked planes of shattered glass. 

(his had looked like thin netting and fabric folds of light spilling from his chest, growing like a magician’s trick as he pulled it from his chest. there’s a neat hole there now, raw edges soothed over by the dealer’s power. he’s not sure if he misses it)

\--

Of all the guns he likes his twin Colts the most. 

He's good with others, of course, is a crack shot with a rifle and able with a shotgun and with other pistols. 

He'd picked them up just before he started using the name Clayton Sharpe, had bought them on the kind of impulse he usually smothered.

It was a little stupid, you don't actually get much more than a slightly higher rate of fire and a hell of a time reloading but-

He just liked them, and told himself it sold the Clayton Sharpe persona.

(amos kinsley had a relic of a rifle and found out the hard way they ain't much good in close quarters with one broken hand-)

He just likes them.

\--

He spends years drifting around as a gun for hire, wandering in and out of lives like luck wandering in and out of a gambler's hands.

He kills monsters and humans, which are sometimes the same thing, at the behest of gold or the Dealer. He keeps quiet and his guns clean, and tries not to shoot no one or nothing that don't go after him first. There's a new name at every introduction, a new story he lets himself get fanciful with on occasion, learns how to get people to leave him alone no matter how much he unnerves them.

They can tell there's something off with him, want him gone and he can't blame them, really.

It's not especially exciting as a life, when he's not getting shot at or covered in monster guts.

He's careful not to make a name for himself, or a while, at least. 

(years later he refuses to explain where in the hell "coffin" came from, won't say that it was the result of a deeply morbid joke rather than a comment on his skills)

\--

The Dealer sends him to Deadwood, though he doesn’t know why. There are gambling halls aplenty, which Clayton avoids. He can feel something weird out in the hills but the Dealer ain’t sent him that way and he’s inclined to live and let live as it is.

This inclination serves him well in Deadwood, a place with the strangest combination of lawlessness and iron clad rules he’s ever been in. 

Most folks avoid him, he’s well practiced at constant glowers.

\--

Al Swearengen calls him up, and he goes for lack of anything better to do.

He nearly turns around and walks right the fuck back out when he enters the room and sees the holy man settled awkwardly at the table.

_Stay_ the Dealer murmurs, asshole that it is. It sounds almost excited. 

He sits down. 

\--

So he is getting sent out to the weirdness in the hills after all. He hadn't expected company.

He can feel the Dealer looming tall behind him.

\--

It takes sitting down at a table in the saloon below before Clayton notices something.

_Huh,_ Clayton thinks, staring at the void where the good Reverend's soul should be. The space around it is ragged and splintered, like it had been taken by force than in any sort of trade or deal, fair or no. 

He looks at the genuinely kind expression on the man's face, and thinks _huh_ again.

\--

The giant pit of snake abominations is new. 

He's seen some weird shit in his time as a soulless apparently immortal gun for hire for a god but the monsters had never before numbered this many-there must be thousands of corpses down there. 

He doesn't like this.

\--

The good Reverend is surprisingly able in a fight, for all his yelping.

Clayton will think about that later, how the man had made sure to immediately do the thing anyone who'd ever touched a gun before wouldn't, how his hands had been well away from the uncocked trigger of an unloaded gun, how he doesn't fumble when he reloads. 

But that's for later.

\--

Clayton feels the first time the Reverend bets and has a moment to feel sorry for the poor bastard, cause you can’t bet what you don’t have and he expects nothing to happen at best.

Lighting leaps from the Reverend’s hands, and Clayton almost trips.

\--

“God don’t play cards,” he says, a warning. 

The Dealer looms behind the Revered, usual humanoid form abandoned for something massive and sprawling like the ancient live oaks from his hometown, great branches laying low and coiling around them.

There is blue light in the cracks in the bark.

(clayton doesn’t see the faintest spark of that same blue pulsing between the reverend's ribs)

\--

_Well it can’t be avoiding things without souls_ , he thinks, staring at the fog that parts around the Reverend but stays heavy around his own feet. 

What else could it be?

(his heart thumps steadily in his chest)

\--

Arabella Whitlock is goddamn terrifying with a scalpel in her hand and Clayton resists the urge to keep an eye on her as much as he is on the probably not a corpse lying on the table. 

\--

“Lesser servants,” the Doc spits, and Clayton is confused and tired and pissed off and he fires. 

\--

The worst thing he's yet done, Clayton thinks, staring at the mouth of Aloysius's revolver, is making Miss Miriam think he was something worth crying over. 

He wants to tell her he'll be fine, that he's gotten back up from worse (that there's no little voice in the back of his head wondering when the Dealer will decide it's been one death too many) but Aloysius and whatever madness that's taken him (he knows that this is) will hear. 

He tries to speak of innocence (just that one time) and sees the words dropping into the endless empty well behind Aly's eyes and hears "-if this had been but a few hours ago" and thinks of the guilt a good man may feel and thinks _fuck this_.

(unseen the dealer is smiling)

"This is called a backfire," the man who is now Clayton Sharpe to his friends says, "it's what happens when a spell don't work or you use the Joker in your hand." 

He sees the Reverend twitch, just slightly.

"Now I know you are a good man, Aloysius Fogg, an intelligent one. You yourself said this might be different but a few hours ago. I just ask you to wait, for a time. I am perfectly willing to be locked up in a place of your choosing until this effect has run its course. If you still wish to duel after that I will abide by that and the law you bring with you."

The emptiness in Aly's eyes doesn't abate, but there's a slight shift, somewhere in there. 

"How long?" Aloysius asks.

Clayton barely keeps a grimace off his face because "Six days, that's the longest this particular…..affliction lasts."

"And how do you know this?"

"....seen it before," Clayton says, careful to keep his gaze on Aly's face and not catch the other's expressions from the corner of his eye.

"They gonna keep you to your word," Aly tips his head toward the others.

"Yes," Clayton replies, flat and firm.

Aly stares at him, gaze empty as the gun barrel for a long terrible moment before he says "All right then," and lowers the gun.

\--

A cell mostly used to corral drunks ain't a bad place to stay maybe a week in, Clayton thinks tiredly, better than having to dig up out of a grave and leave town again.

He looks back at the three people arranged near the bars of his new room and thinks about reconsidering that statement.

Aloysius had absconded to his hotel room to bandage his wounds, apparently secure in the knowledge that Clayton wasn't going anywhere.

The ladies acquired chairs from somewhere, having chased the Sheriff from the room with a flurry of skirts and some form of cover story he's gonna have to get the details of later. Arabella is staring at him with the same intent look she'd given Farnum's corpse, which is all kinds of alarming.

The Reverend is standing near the door, leaning against the wall and watching the room with dark eyes and arms loosely crossed. 

Miriam is perched on the chair more or less directly in front of the bars, and Clayton hasn't fought the urge to shuffle his damn feet like a guilty schoolboy since he was knee high but one of his boots scrape slightly anyway.

"Mister Sharpe," Miss Miriam says, delicate tone in direct opposition to how her gaze is fixed on his face, "if I may be so bold, how is it that my recognized that has occurred with Mr. Fogg. You said you recognized it, but I had been inclined to believe that you were in the dark along with the rest of us. Is that not correct?"

"I have never seen anything like those snake demons before," Clayton begins, only to be cut off by a rough bark of laughter from the Reverend.

"You’re not an especially good liar, are you?" 

Clayton glances at the rough edged void in the Reverend's chest where his soul should be. 

"Not especially." _Not like you_ nearly slips out, and the Reverend catches it going by the expression on his face.

"Gentlemen," Miriam snaps and both men look back to her. 

“Apologies,” the Reverend rumbles, settling back. Clayton tips his head down slightly. 

-

“I met the Dealer some years ago,” Clayton says, truth a hangman’s noose he’s willingly put round his neck. It chokes just the same, as he watches the realization bloom. 

“How long ago?” Miriam asks. She’s looking at him a mite warily, and a muffled part of him hurts, just a bit.

(“-the one I trust most in this-”)

“Near about fifteen years now,” he replies after a pause. He lets them think it’s cause he had to think about it, not that he wasn’t sure he wanted them to know how long he’d been-

“Was there something like these snake creatures then as well? When you met-it,” Miriam is sitting straight backed in her chair, hands folded primly across her lap.

“....no,” Clayton drags a hand over his face and almost wishes he’d just let Aloysius shoot him. He’d never had to explain before. “It was simply a...business opportunity, for it, I believe.”

He takes a breath.

“Get an idiot kid to bet his way into service, get a gunslinger, I think. I’m still not rightly sure why it picked me. I go where it tells me, take care of the kind of nonsense like the snake abominations cause it don’t like crooked tables.”

“What were you saying earlier, about the law being wrong?” Arabella abruptly interjects, eyes sharp. She’s leaning forward, intent.

“It was a frame up job,” Clayton says simply, like this ain’t the first time anyone’s asked and been told. He sees Miriam jerk in her seat, can all but see her thinking through how things may’ve played out.

“Don’t martyr me,” he growls, “I done enough and worse to deserve whatever woulda put me in the ground, I just-” he cuts himself off.

“Just what?” The Reverend asks. He has an odd expression on his face, and Clayton thinks of eyes and scar rendered in ink. 

“...just didn’t want to get myself shot for the one goddamn thing I didn’t do.”

Miriam watches him for a long moment before she nods, just slightly. 

“Mister Sharpe,” Arabella says suddenly, with a bright eyed look on her face he’s already learning to dread, “most men don’t bet themselves into service of whatever kind of god or the like this is as a prize.”

And, curse her, she lets the notion hang there in front of all their faces, with the Dealer’s terms still fresh in their heads. 

He doesn’t want them to ask. So he speaks first.

“I did not win my bet, no,” he says, flat, “and no, as per the terms I do not have my soul.”

Miriam makes a very quiet noise.

“It doesn’t make as much a difference as you’d think,” he rushes to say, because he doesn’t want that expression on Miss Miriam’s face and he can’t help the way his eyes flick to the Reverend. 

The Reverend catches the look and stiffens slightly, “I am not about to condemn you, Mister Sharpe, for poor luck.”

_Oh_ , Clayton thinks, and shock makes his tongue loose, “Is that how you lost yours?” 

\--

(there was a fort once, in the mountains. it was small and had no walls. there were men with horses there, and guns. there were men screaming there, in the dark. 

the fort was small and had no walls. there were men bleeding there, blood black in the moonlight. 

the fort was small and had no walls. there were things in the dark that were not men nor horses. 

the fort was small. there were few men with horses, fewer guns.

the fort had no walls. there were things in the dark and darker blood on the ground on trees on horses’ hides and leather saddles.

there was a fort once, in the mountains.)

\--

“..........what?”

“You said you ran, during that attack in the night,” Clayton says, watching the Reverend’s steadily paling face. “Do you know what it was?”

“No, it was-it was too dark there was just screaming and-”

“And?”

“.....when I woke up the attack had begun, and I was on my horse. ”

\--

The dead have been walking the world for years now, ever since Gettysburg. Most are puppets of little demons, troublemakers and killers in suits of slowly rotting meat. Some are facsimiles of the departed whose truths rest six feet underground.

Some are unknowing servants of gods. 

Some are discarded, once they’ve served their purpose.

Sometimes something else finds them.

(blue light flares between the still ribs of the corpse in the horse’s saddle)

\--

“You’ve always looked familiar,” the Reverend will murmur later, slouched next to him with his fingers curled around a shot glass. He’s looking at Clayton’s bare hands, scarred up knuckles and freckles and the odd patterns that mirror the mark over his heart.

Clayton will think of mirrors and why he doesn’t like to look the Dealer in the face.

“Figures,” he’ll say, and order another round.

\--------------


End file.
